228 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



moment let us turn to what it teaches us also with regard to the 

 history and the special claims of Christianity. Approaching Chris- 

 tianity on the side of its alleged history, it establishes the three 

 following points : It shows us first that this alleged history, with 

 the substantial truth of which Christianity stands or falls, con- 

 tains a number of statements which are demonstrably at variance 

 with fact ; secondly, that it contains others which, though very 

 probably true, are entirely misinterpreted through the ignorance 

 of the writers who recorded them ; and, thirdly, that though the 

 rest may not be demonstrably false, yet those among them most 

 essential to the Christian doctrine are so monstrously improbable 

 and so utterly unsupported by evidence that we have no more 

 ground for believing in them than we have in the wolf of 

 Romulus. 



Such, briefly stated, are the main conclusions of science in so 

 far as they bear on theology and the theologic conception of hu- 

 manity. Let us now consider exactly what their bearing is. Prof. 

 Huxley distinctly tells us that the knowledge we have reached as 

 to the nature of things in general does not enable us to deduce 

 from it any absolute denial either of the existence of a personal 

 God or of an immortal soul in man, or even of the possibility and 

 the actual occurrence of miracles. On the contrary, he would 

 believe to-morrow in the miraculous history of Christianity if 

 only there were any evidence sufficiently cogent in its favor ; and 

 on the authority of Christianity he would believe in God and in 

 man's immortality. Christianity, however, is the only religion in 

 the world whose claims to a miraculous authority are worthy of 

 serious consideration, and science, as we have seen, considers these 

 claims to be unfounded. What follows is this — whether there be 

 a God or no, and whether he has given us immortal souls or no, 

 science declares bluntly that he has never informed us of either 

 fact ; and if there is anything to warrant any belief in either, it 

 can be found only in the study of the natural universe. Accord- 

 ingly, to the natural universe science goes, and we have just seen 

 what it finds there. Part of what it finds bears specially on the 

 theologic conception of God, and part bears specially on the theo- 

 logic conception of man. With regard to God, to an intelligent 

 creator and ruler, it finds him on every ground to be a baseless 

 and a superfluous hypothesis. In former conditions of knowledge 

 it admits that this was otherwise — that the hypothesis then was 

 not only natural but necessary ; for there were many seeming 

 mysteries which could not be explained without it. But now the 

 case has been altogether reversed. One after another these mys- 

 teries have been analyzed, not entirely, but to this extent at all 

 events, that the hypothesis of an intelligent creator is not only 

 nowhere necessary, but it generally introduces far more difficulties 



